Research On Cross-cultural Management Of International Retailers

As the expansion of enterprises'scale and scope of oversea business, cultural differences among countries or regions will deeply affect the enterprises'decisions and behaviors. This requires execution of Multi-cultural Management - which can blend the local culture into the enterprise's operating activities, achieve communication and fusion between cultures, so that multinational corporations'competitive strengths can be significantly improved.The retailing industry in developed countries has been developing over decades– the diversified operating styles have become mature, systematism and collectivism have been formed. Meanwhile, because of the characteristics - the easy entry into retailing industry and the tiny differentiation among competitors, the civil markets are almost saturated, which makes the industry profits lower and lower; it's really very essential for the retailing enterprises who want to become a tycoon to occupy as many oversea markets as possible. On the other hand, consumers are no longer satisfied with local merchandise and services, desires for goods with foreign culture and features are growing. Both the reasons lead to the large corporations'breakout of the limitation of the homeland, so that continuous business growth can be reached. When it comes to 1990s, the process of economic globalization speeded up, which provided the internationalized operations a fine external environment. Retailing industry is deeply entrenched in the local culture, native enterprises usually own a favorable geographic position. To retailers from another country, to conquer the cultural differences, multi-cultural management counts for an even more important position.Since December, 2004, when the Chinese government declared off some limitations and fully opened the retailing market to the global enterprises, foreign retailers have entered China faster than ever, over 80% of the 50 largest global retailing enterprises have come in, and kept expanding their market share, brought great changes to the Chinese retailing structure. Domestic retailing enterprises used to have a relatively low productivity, weakly integrated resources, and low growth rate. At the influx of large amount of foreign capital, many local small medium enterprises have been eliminated. To stay in the industry and continue to make development, Chinese retailers have to flow the globalization steps closely, no matter compete locally, or walk out to operate internationally. When talking about oversea sales, some domestic enterprises are meaning foreign trade, which is a mistaken concept. If one enterprise only wants to sell its products oversea, probably it'll sell nothing. Even it has sold something, as most companies do, the only thing can be got is short-term money. Internationalization is very different from foreign trade, it is multivariant– products internationalized, marketing internationalized, people internationalized. Internationalization must be treated as a long-term strategy and be carefully studied. According to the theory of direct foreign investment, the Chinese retailing enterprises obviously lack the dominants of direct foreign investment. But that is not to say, there is no possibility that the Chinese industry can be globalized, yet we have the prominent purchasing conveniences. However, we are still short in the experience of international operations; there are full of obstacles in front when we plan to"walk out", and multinational management is one of the biggest problems during the process. Foreign retailers represent higher lever of productivity, the local companies can not only imitate and follow up their operation modes, also can learn from their way of entering a new marker.This article is firstly discussing about multinational management, defining some terms, studying some different divisions of cultural dimensions, stating the connection between ethnic culture and organizational culture, providing options for multinational companies to manage internal structures oversea. Then the writer is introducing a profile of retailing industry, summarizing the current situation of international retailing competition; mainly quoting the biggest British retailer- Tesco's successful case of Multi-national Management, taking Tesco's Chinese operations as subject and its oversea human resource strategy, main modes in entering a new market and the application of innovative ability in new countries as key points, probing from the two aspects– organizational culture management and local market culture management, trying to conclude its experience to get some general methods; hoping them can be utilized when our own retailers start to explore oversea markets.